Gardening for Your Kitchen Table: Sprouts
I wasn’t into gardening in the 70’s (unless you count eating dirt while running around my yard in diapers) but those of my friends who were a bit older then, remember growing their own sprouts in a jar or a basket, forgetting about them on a windowsill and that memorable odour of neglected, fuzzy sprouts.
Well if that’s how you remember sprouting, then welcome to the new millennium. For Christmas / Chanukah last year, I was the lucky recipient of an automatic sprouter. This lovely contraption has a water basin below a tray for your seeds and sprinklers that automatically turns on and off at some random intervals that I have yet to figure out. All you need to do is change the water in the basin daily, find a nice spot with some indirect light and in 4-6 days you’ll be eating crunchy fresh greens right from your tabletop.
Sprouts are nutritious little mini-plants full digestible energy, bioavailable vitamins, amino acids, minerals, enzymes, proteins and photochemicals. All that good stuff is locked up within the seeds just waiting for you to give it the start needed to create a plant. For more information on sprouting go here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprouting.
Needless to say, many of us in cold climates are lacking nutrients in the winter. Fresh vegetables aren’t growing in our gardens anymore, our pantry and freezers are emptying of the previous year’s harvest and we are resorting (ugh!) to buying our fresh produce shipped in from warmer climates. That combined with the gardening itch that starts ramping up after Christmas for me, got me into sprouting.
{From left: sprouting spelt berries, sunflower seeds, and alfalfa / radish / red clover mix; the Fresh Life Automatic Sprouter; the whirling sprinker is a hit with the under 4 crowd.}
As I was organizing all of my packets of seeds for the garden this coming season, I started feeling overwhelmed with the idea that I could very possibly be a garden hoarder! Not really, but I do have a lot more seeds than I can possibly grow this year, or any year for that matter. It seems reasonable then to sprout the suckers now and eat them before I have to call A&E and register for the show. PS: My sprouter and my seeds come from West Coast Seeds.
January 09 2010 11:55 am | Gardening and Growing Food
melanie watts on 11 Jan 2010 at 8:01 pm #
Interesting gadget. I remember growing alfalfa sprouts, in the eighties, I think. I would be cool to try sprouting something else and I would probably like the crunchy results.
Stevie on 13 Jan 2010 at 11:17 pm #
It makes it a whole lot easier when it’s automatic. In my books it’s worth the money!